


Every hollow has its favorite sound

by lilith_morgana



Series: Swtor: Adeve Vreen [1]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 06:17:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8521762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: He doesn't remember names; he will never forget hers.





	

Corso Riggs is in love with the woman who just sauntered into the cantina, one hand on her hip, the other one caressing her blaster in an almost obscene fashion.   
  
It would be painful to watch how in love he is, Darmas thinks as he eyes her thoroughly, painful if he allowed himself to care about such things. As it stands he merely tucks the observation into his neatly arranged memory, stores it as information to put in writing later, perhaps, though it’s unlikely that the Empire will ever require that much intel on Corso Riggs.   
  
The woman, on the other hand. _She’s_ a different story.   
  
“Can’t help it if I’m popular with all the wrong people,” she says and leans back in her seat, demonstratively spreading her legs.   
  
She’s older than Corso probably thinks she is, far more experienced and not nearly as wholesome. Maybe she was, once, but life has taken it out of her. Removed it, with or without force. Darmas can tell. There’s a little gap in her posture where that bit used to be and it’s attractive as fuck.     
  
_She_ is, in a battle-hardened, rough kind of way. Scars and tattoos and the hint of cybernetics along her neck, she looks like someone who makes it a habit of climbing out of burnings wrecks with an arrogant shrug. He’s got to admit he has a thing for those kinds of survival skills.   
  
“So, what did you have for me?” she asks.   
  
Darmas offers her a slow, lingering grin. “Oh, I can think of a few things.”   
  
“Thought as much.” She sits up properly, interest definitely piqued. Easier than he thought, this one. And much more entertaining in every sense of the word. _Well done, farm boy._   
  
“Maybe we should start with a little sabacc? First game’s on me.”   
  


* * *

  
  
  
She’s incredibly turned on by how predictable it all is.   
  
Exchanges of pleasantries, tossing about of luscious lies and compliments neither of them properly mean - he’s handsome but not _that_ handsome, she’s not half as beautiful as he claims - and then they fuck in the stained seats beside the sabacc table. Darmas kisses the soft patches of skin along the sides of her breasts and belly and she locks her legs around his hips, pushing him inside her. There’s something impossibly _sordid_ about the whole affair and they don’t pretend otherwise which sort of gives it an edge, sort of makes her crave more, faster, deeper. _Again_ . He flat-out laughs when she says that, wonders if she knows how old he is. Still gets her off, though, tongue between her legs and his hands cradling her ass.     
  
“Let’s get you cleaned up, my dear,” he says afterwards, his voice just on the right side of smarmy.   
  
She’s incredibly turned on by how _predictable_ it all is, yet she could never have foreseen the messages that pop up in her private channel when she’s left.   
  
She even reads them - _twice_ \- before pressing delete.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
She visits him again before she leaves. Neither of them had predicted it.   
  
He sends her a filthy message just as she enters the spaceport - an instinct more than a decision. She reads it, grin on her face; reads it again later in her bunk where one hand travels down to the spots where she imagines his mouth and tongue.   
  
It’s _ludicrous_ .   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
There’s not a lot of information he can collect about Adeve Vreen, errand girl of the Republic, at least not at first glance.   
  
Holonet is not overly helpful, merely offers her official story: human woman with unknown birthplace, raised all over the Corellian run. A street-rat turned ship-rat with no listed family anywhere though there are some records about a brother - possibly a foster brother - caught on Hutta and brought to jail for illegal trade.   
  
Other sources claim Adeve used to work at various seedy entertainment venues once she was of semi-appropriate age but he can’t find more details about it than that and quite honestly he doesn’t want to. He pokes where he needs to poke and turns the covers where it’s required but overall, Darmas realises, he keeps an unusual distance to this particular mission. There’s a first for everything.   
  
He assumes he’s getting sloppy, his senses dulled by age or callousness.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
He visits her ship on Coruscant.   
  
They’re staying, doing maintenance and repairs and Adeve stocks up on necessities among the merchants - alcohol, stealth tech, odd and pretty-looking pieces of clothing she hopes she’ll have the opportunity to wear at some point in her life.   
  
They’re _staying_ and Darmas arrives, all fresh-smelling suits and banalities. She pretends he’s there to be given a few samples of intel better delivered in person. What he pretends, she doesn’t know.   
  
“You look wonderful, my dear,” he says, hand on the ship wall.   
  
“Yeah,” Adeve agrees, “the ship’s pretty damn fine.”  
  
Darmas turns her around, spins her in his arms until they’re face to face and kisses her mouth and neck. Closing her eyes she feels fingertips brush over the scattering of scars on the left side of her face, the splash of marks she has there and she’s about to say something about them when he kisses her there, too.   
  
“One day,” he whispers, “I’d love to learn the history behind those.”  
  
_Don’t get your hopes up, old man_ , she thinks but something prevents her from saying it.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
On a whim - or a calculated stroke of luck and good planning - he takes her to a swoop race on Nar Shaddaa. It’s a memorial rally and the place is bursting at the seams with people and noise. Perfect spot to get lost in, fly under the radar and try to talk to his favourite smuggler.   
  
“So now, my dear, you’re Dodonna’s privateer,” he says. This woman has a way of removing at least seventy percent of his subtlety.   
  
Adeve looks at him over her large nerfburger - he had asked her to pick the snacks, had hoped for better taste but he’s not surprised, not truly, that she’d go with burgers - and nods, briefly. _No business_ , she had said when she agreed to come.   
  
“Imagine that.” Her eyes has a certain spark that works like a charm on him, a hook in them catching something in his body, dragging it out into the light. She seems to know it, too.   
  
_She’s clever_ , he had told the Senator. _Don’t underestimate her._   
  
“Wanna gamble?” her voice is light here, out of context. “My credit’s on the green bike over there.”   
  
Darmas can’t hold back a genuine grin. “The twi’lek? Not likely. Have you seen the rattataki lady? She’ll conquer them all.”   
  
“We’ll see, won’t we?”   
  
“Indeed.”   
  
So he leans back beside her, one arm casually thrown around her shoulder and turns his attention to the race, at least for one moment, one slice out of time where they can both pretend to be free people.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Once, in a mostly empty fortress in Republic space, Darmas brings her the best kind of smuggled goods - a few upgrades for her scattergun, sliced tech parts from outlawed droids, a whole box full of chocolate - and Adeve fucks him in the medbay to the hum of the kolto tanks.   
  
“I see you take precautions,” he comments, nodding towards one of them. “I do like that in a woman.”   
  
“Whatever floats your speeder.” She buttons her pants again, rubbing her sweaty palms against her thighs. “I prefer it like this, though. Not a fan of pain.”   
  
Darmas slings one arm around her, dragging her to bed once more; she straddles him, a shiver of pleasure as he runs his blunt nails down her naked back. When she lowers herself a bit more, his tongue comes around her nipple, sucking softly with just a hint of teeth.   
  
“I’ll remember not to inflict any, then,” he mutters gently. “Wouldn’t want to hurt someone as lovely as you, my dear.”   
  
“Stars, you’re cheesy,” she grunts but it’s hard to mind very much when he’s got the most skilled fracking fingers in these parts of the galaxy. _Gambler’s hands_ , he’s told her once, voice low and filthy, breath damp against her neck.   
  
Her pants are undone again in a second, her breath catching in her throat.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
She knows Darmas Pollaran isn’t his real name. Can’t be. It doesn’t suit him; it suits him too well.   
  
When she asks about it, once in a vast hotel suite wearing nothing but a cocktail glass in her left hand, he laughs.   
  
“We’re all liars,” he says, matter-of-factly   
  
She isn’t, not when it comes to these things. She never tells.   
  
  
\---   
  
  
The flurry of women in his memory - a whole swirl of faces, bodies, manners and clichés - is enough to make him satiated most days. Some days it even makes him weary.   
  
So _many_ women - and a bunch of men, too, he’s not all that conservative and with a few drinks in his system he’s capable of promising anyone anything - and no names to their faces, no such things to chain them in his mind. There, at least, everyone can be free. Seems apt somehow, almost poetic.   
  
He doesn’t remember names; he will never forget hers.   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Once, as the inevitable war draws nearer and they’re both weary from it all, she falls asleep in his arms after they’ve fucked all over his place on Coruscant.   
  
He dozes off too and wakes up to a mess of tangled braids and smeared makeup on his shoulder, to one heavily tattooed arm clutching his chest and the sound of someone else’s soft snoring. There’s a novelty in that scene that isn’t lost on him; there’s a buried notion deep down, a faint regret.   
  
Adeve mumbles something in her sleep and turns over, revealing her naked body as her legs get tangled in the sheets. A long scar on her back, too, badly covered in ink as though she had just wanted it gone, no matter how the result might be. Seems like her. He’s filed the word ‘impulsive’ away in his head.   
  
Impulsive. _Impossible_ .   
  
She’s more beautiful than he remembers thinking she was the first time he saw her, as though his brain has finally overloaded and begun screwing up his own data in there, corrupting his memory. That’s probably for the best anyway. A lot of shit in there, all things considered. Some highlights and victories but mostly greyed out _nothings_ .   
  
_Service isn’t it’s own reward, who would have thought, eh?_   
  
Darmas shakes his head, closing his eyes again.   
  
If he places one hand over her chest, between those immensely delectable tits of hers, he will feel her heartbeat. So he does. The distant rhythm of it carries him back to sleep, once more. _Just once_ , he thinks before the dreams drag him away. _One time doesn’t count._   
  
When they both wake up a few hours later, Darmas summons food - bread, cheese, ladybabies and omelettes -  from a nearby diner and wine from his own cupboards. They eat in silence, side by side in bed.   
  
He leaves no intel report for that day, erases every trace of it from all of his records.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
“It was special,” she tells him on Corellia and he wants to brush it off like he does with everything else but he finds that this leaves a wound. Her voice. Her face. The barely visible but still distinct lines around her mouth as she speaks. “ _You_ were special. You made me laugh.”   
  
She sounds tired; he’s exhausted.   
  
  
\---   
  
  
“You’re not the first woman I’ve lied to for the Empire, but you’re the first who ever made me regret it.”   
  
Adeve watches him being taken away with her hands curled to fists behind her back to stop them from shaking with anger.   
  
_I know you always have your price_ , Darmas echoes in her head and she decides, her mouth dry, that he’d never be able to offer her enough, not nearly a _fraction_ of what she deserves.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Expectedly, life as a Republic POW isn’t as horrid as it’s made out to be where he comes from. He’s to answer questions if he’s being asked, help out with inquiries when possible and talk, when ordered to.   
  
Nobody believes a thing he says until they’ve ran at least triple checks in all of their networks and Darmas watches them scurry about, occasionally amusing himself with calculations of how many Republican officers it takes to get something simple done. Walk a prisoner down a corridor - three. Investigate a piece of information he tosses in their general direction because he’s bored - five. Check a blatant lie from an Imperial Agent - sixteen and counting.     
  
He thinks about Adeve a lot. It’s a waste, serving a Republic that will never reward her kind of bravery and skill, a pointless _waste_ devoting her life to a failing side that’s bound to be swallowed by the Empire any day now.   
  
He thinks about Adeve a lot. She told him, with that gun pointed to his head, that she’d visit him in jail and part of him had believed her or wished he believed her.   
  
She never visits, of course.     
  
Prison life, he thinks, would be much more entertaining if she was.   
  
Darmas learns about Ziost as he tries to seduce a female recruit into slipping him some recreational drugs in his cell. _I’m bored out of my skull here, sweetheart._   
  
He learns about the joint forces and Darth Marr’s fleet not too long afterwards and spends the rest of that evening trying to figure out how he thinks the near future will play out. Once, fresh out of training with a head full of codes and professional virtues, he’d be thrilled to see where this new game takes them. Now, he’s too jaded to think it will matter, either way.   
  
What matters are slices, fractions of the whole.   
  
And when he learns that both Darth Marr and Captain Vreen, Republic privateer have fallen, something cracks irrevocably in the composure he’s dedicated a lifetime to completing.   
  
_Talk about waste_ , Adeve would say if she was there with him, but she’ll never be.

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from Liz Phair.


End file.
